The cheeky hostess, heiress Louise Tinsley Steinman, seated sworn enemies Pearson and McCarthy — “the two biggest billygoats in the onion patch,” as Time put it — at the same table for her holiday soiree.

McCarthy had begun spouting his Red Menace bluster that year. Pearson, one of America’s most prominent columnists, was among the first to call him out for generating “harum-scarum” as a reelection ploy.

As Christmas approached, the senator was under scrutiny back home for tax evasion. Pearson leaned across the table and poked McCarthy with a verbal shiv.

McCarthy, still lugging the raw temper he honed as a farm boy, bolted from his seat and invited the scribe to step outside.

Pearson (l. with former soldier Ed Ruff) angered McCarthy with a question about his income taxes.

(Henry Griffin/AP)

Pearson chortled as tablemates held back the steaming McCarthy, a notoriously mean drunk. The statesman bided his time before stalking the journalist to the cloak room hours later.

He spun Pearson and viciously drove his knee twice into the man’s groin while clutching his neck with calloused paws. He then slapped Pearson with such force that witness Richard Nixon, then a young senator from California, later said, “I thought he was going to kill him.”

Much more recently, a tough-guy Montana candidate who had used a Hulk Hogan clinch-throw against a bony reporter a couple of weeks ago won a seat in Congress.

These shameful fisticuffs have a long history, in part, because a reporter’s job involves telling stories that politicians would just as soon keep secret.

A scribe’s lot was particularly high-risk in the late 1800s, for example.

In 1889, a New Jersey reporter named John Havens was thrashed at the Hoboken police station by Edward Stanton, a local councilman and detective. Havens apparently had suggested the councilman dabbled in nepotism.

A news report said Stanton, like the Montana goon, sneak-attacked the reporter “while Havens was writing and was unprepared.” The result: “The reporter’s face was much disfigured.”

McCarthy reads telegrams that he said congratulated him on his violent encounter with Pearson two days after the incident.

(Henry Burroughs/ASSOCIATED PRESS)

A year later, in March 1890, papers reported “a veritable Donnybrook Fair” in a state capitol corridor in Albany after feelings were wounded during a labor law hearing. Senators, assemblymen, labor bosses and journalists slugged it out, and a labor reporter for a New York paper, identified only as Dunham, got the worst of it.

Jacob Rice, a Kingston assemblyman, nobly jumped in to try to shield poor Dunham from further damage. When it was over, the Times said, Dunham, Rice and a third man looked like they had “passed through the first stage of a cider press.”

Reporters elsewhere were subjected to similar peril.

In Chicago in 1892, a prominent judge and former state’s attorney, Joel Longenecker, laid into reporter Mark Salt “in a moment of uncontrollable rage,” according to a news report.

Salt had written a story implicating Longenecker in a boodle-and-bribery scandal engulfing the local school board. Salt swore out a warrant, but Longenecker sidestepped indictment and kept his job.

And so did Sen. McCarthy, who was proud as a peacock over his assault on Pearson.

He phoned Frank Waldrop, editor of the Washington Times-Herald, just after the attack and crowed, “I just kicked Drew Pearson in the nuts!”

McCarthy spent the rest of his abbreviated life swaggering over his big ball-busting. His retelling evolved into a narrative demonstration that he shared with fellow senators and Wisconsin homies.

Pearson filed a libel suit against the senator, but it fell apart in 1956. McCarthy died a year later.

(George Skadding/The LIFE Picture Collection/Gett)

He often claimed that he learned the kneed-groin technique from a Wisconsin tribesman, “Indian Charlie,” who gave him this advice: “You start kicking him in the groin and keep kicking and kicking until there’s nothing left in the groin — until you win.”

Pearson was not so giddy about the knee job. His only whimsy over the attack was a pair of boxing gloves he hung on the wall of his Washington office.

He filed a $5 million libel suit against McCarthy that specifically asked for $250,000 damages for the Sulgrave Club assault.

The case dragged on for years, outliving McCarthy’s front-page heyday, which expired 63 years ago, on June 9, 1954, when attorney Joseph Welch asked the question that finally shut him up: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

The lawsuit died of exhaustion in 1956, and McCarthy and his thoroughly pickled liver followed it to the grave a year later, at age 49.

Drew Pearson’s journalism star continued to ascend long after his old adversary had lost his twinkle.

His “Washington Merry-Go-Round” column, which he began writing in 1932, was running in nearly 1,000 newspapers when he died of a heart attack in 1969 at age 71.